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12/04/2008

Westboro Baptist Church's Shirley Phelps-Roper may think that we gays are hellbound perverts, but one should not lump her in with Mormon-evangelical "Protect Marriage" coalition that passed the anti-gay Proposition 8. When it comes to both the "yes on 8" crew's false righteousness and Prop 8's ability to hold up under legal challenge, Westboro's most visible member actually trends more towards our direction.

Here, check out this Prop 8 statement that Shirl has given us:

Mormons are a false religious system and they will NEVER get anything right. It is hard for me to fathom what twisted logic went into their efforts on this Prop 8. Time and space would fail me to speak of the outrage I feel when I contemplate what those dirty old bastards that run that Mormon thing and that follow after a pervert like Joseph Smith. A MAN!! He was a nasty little pedophile pervert with a fairy tale that he cooked up to get the perverts of his day to go along while he blasphemed the Living God that created him and said - ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN, ONE LIFETIME!! That God who said DON'T ADD ONE WORD and DON'T TAKE AWAY ONE WORD from the things that are written in this book! YIKES!! Dummies must have missed that part.

So take all those groups and see the mass of confusion that rules the day among them, and understand clearly what God did here. First, he caused those lazy, hating brutes to have to rise out of their slumber and spend a HUGE amount of time and money to do a thing NOT for the right reason, which would be - BECAUSE ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN, ONE LIFETIME is the standard of the Living God. NO - NOT for that reason. But because in their arrogant rebellion, those creeps decided that they would set the standards of what is righteous.

NOW - because of their rebellion, God is going to cause their efforts to be in vain. He will frustrate them. They were asleep at the wheel while this nation turned the keys to the kingdom over to the fags. THEY ARE BOUND!! Prop 8 is TOO LITTLE TOO LATE AND FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS!! So as a special treat, God has given them judges that will take their efforts, turn back all that effort and they will put that election result away with the stroke of a pen. You just watch and see if they don't. :-) Of a truth, when a nation has kicked the righteousness of God and HIS standards to the curb, I don't know what words they will fill the paper with to do it, but after what I have seen in Baltimore and other places by a nation of rebels, I have NO doubt that they will knock down Prop 8 and the burden and the cost to do something about it will all fall to the lazy phony "Christians" and other brutes to fight them. It is all so perfect. It is confusion of face and it is just what this nation deserves and badly needs.

If I had spare time to give to it, I would try to picture the faces of all those people that thought they had buttoned down their righteousness called - No Gay Marriage. YIKES! It makes me happy to think of them being so mad about some activists judges that they can do nothing about.

Gee, we thought we were the only ones who daydreamed about the "yes on 8" side's post-failure faces. You know, if it wasn't for the whole condemning us to hell, calling us "fags," picketing funerals, hating any form of religion other than that which is espoused by her father, standing against progress in the name of God thing, we could probably hire Shirl to be a guest columnist. It's too bad, really.

Your thoughts

Good ol' Shirley. She articulates exactly how many if not most evangelical Christians feel about the Mormons. In my initial reaction to the passage of Prop. 8, I exploited this by calling Mormons an evil cult. However, not all Mormons are evil, but that does not make their cult any less evil.

Now let's have some fun and provoke her to tell us what she thinks about Catholics.

That Shirl! If I had been in charge of the "No On 8" ad budget, someone would have had to talk me down from running back-to-back WBC snippets on every channel 24/7 - with the tag line, "Are you sure that you want to vote yes on 8?" That would have been a winning strategy!

Posted by: Dick Mills | Dec 4, 2008 3:19:50 PM

But then we have S.F. Archbishop Niederauer thanking the Mormons for heeding HIS CALL:
'But Niederauer's most prominent action was drawing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members responded with intensive grassroots organizing and an estimated $20 million in campaign contributions from individuals that accounted for half of the Yes on 8 campaign's total." This from article where he defended his role, sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/03/BAE814GUON.DTL

Really like this piece by Shirley though!... even though it was the RCC who 'hired' the Mormons. You know just like they hired Judas.

Posted by: LOrion | Dec 4, 2008 4:19:30 PM

You know the biggest Irony of this quote of Shirl's is the fact that the man she calls a "pedophile pervert", Joseph Smith, Jr. actually had a great deal of support toward gay people of his day and showed absolutely no homophobia. This is according to my friend D. Michael Quinn's research including his book entitled Same Sex Dynamics Among 19th Century Americans: a Mormon Example. I am deeply hurt and saddened that the Church of my youth and life decided to be hell bent on thwarting our efforts to gain marriage equality. This realization cuts and hurts me to my core; however the damned self-righteous Evangelicals and other Christians who are anti-gay who think that they have some sort of patent on Christianity are full of b.s. Who's to say that their interpretation of the Bible and Noah's ark as well as the story of Jesus literally turning water into wine is any more believable than Joseph Smith's explanation of the gold plates, his visions as well as the visions of other early Latter-day Saints or the account of the visit of the angel Moroni? The only difference is that one story happened thousands of years ago and the other happened only a little over 150 years ago and is not accepted as part of main stream Christian tradition. Of course it's not. The First Century Christians were considered heretics, cultists and extremists by the mainstream Jewish sects (the traditional religionists) of their day. The hypocrisy of those who are Evangelical extremists is so evident in their rabid anti-Mormon views. Too many people think they know a lot about Mormonism when in reality they don't have a clue about it and have not read much if anything contained in the volumes of exhaustive research and primary sources that tell a story of a fascinating, unique and remarkable movement in American history.

I have also seen many of the same tactics that Evangelicals used against Mormonism used in similar ways toward gay people. One of the most tragic and saddening things for me to see is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acting far more like their so-called Christian Evangelical friends in hating gay people and trying to take away our marriage equality; than they are acting like traditional Latter-day Saints. I honestly believe a huge part of the Mormon Church's intention is to be accepted more by mainstream Christianity. First you have post polygamy assimilation of the LDS Church into American society (an assimilation that was fiercely fought for by the LDS Church in the early to mid 20th century) and next you have assimilation of the LDS Church into mainstream traditional Christian society.

Religion can be an extremely dangerous thing. Thank heaven for the Constitution of the United States in not only protecting us from the possible tyranny of a dominant religion or religions but to also protect one religion from the tyranny of another as well. The modern LDS Church seems to have conveniently forgotten that lesson of the past when it was persecuted terribly from the mob mentality of many of the 19th century Christian sects. Now the LDS Church feels it is protecting the nuclear heterosexual family by persecuting it's gay members as well as harming our larger GLBT community. This is something that is absolutely unacceptable and should not be tolerated. We need to learn from our past, find common ground. When we call Mormonism a "cult" or make other extreme statements like this (including spray painting Mormon chapels, etc.) we are not helping the situation but only causing Mormons and the Church in general to have a bunker mentality. We all lose in the process.

Posted by: Benjamin | Dec 4, 2008 5:03:59 PM

Like the Westboro Baptist Church ISN'T a cult?

Posted by: Bill S | Dec 4, 2008 5:06:15 PM

Sent to the SF Chronicle yesterday:

Dear Editor:

Archbishop Niederaur's statement that "Catholic bishops have a responsibility to teach the faith, and our beliefs about marriage and family are part of this faith" is the perfect example of the hypocrisy and misdirection surrounding Prop. 8.

To the Archbishop, I would say this. I absolutely support your church's right to teach whatever it deems appropriate to your parishioners. But first and foremost, Archbishop, I am NOT a member of your faith, and I resent your admitted efforts to impose it upon me. Prop. 8 dealt with the civil contract called marriage, and therefore was about my equality before the law and my position in secular society, not about your religion.

Divorce, birth control, and abortion are also against church teaching, but apart from ineffectual efforts on the last issue, we see no political campaigns attempting to restrict heterosexuals' access to them. Could that be because an attack on the majority's civil rights just won't fly-- Prop. 4 certainly failed again-- and would rightly be seen as an attempt to impose one denomination's beliefs on people who don't share them? And of course, the courts have also ruled that religious beliefs about contraception and abortion should not determine their availability in civil society-- just like same sex marriage. And as for outlawing divorce? Not a snowball's chance in a mythical Hell.

Some religious groups have always made their disapproval of gay people crystal clear. Although they disagree on the very nature of God and his message to the world-- and history is writ large with the blood and suffering caused by those disagreements-- the one thing they can agree on is that surely, gay people deserve neither the freedom to marry their life partners nor the equality before the law promised by our Constitution.

Which brings me to my final point. Prop. 8 was not actually about marriage, any more than Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell is about military preparedness. It was about what it is always about-- how much the very existence of gay people offends and frightens some straight people. Prop. 8 was fueled by anti-gay prejudice, whether presented as sincere religious belief, as if that were an excuse, or admitted for what it is. The proof of this is the documented set of lies, distortions, and gays-are-gonna-get-your-children fear-mongering that was the Yes on 8 campaign, presented with the full support and authority of the guardians of morality, faith, and family. If they had relied strictly on statements of religious belief, I doubt it would have passed.

Prejudice, religious or otherwise, is not a good basis for public policy, and as we have progressed as a society, we have consistently rejected it-- or have been forced to by the Courts. For this reason, Prop. 8 must be overturned.

Posted by: Ben in Oakland | Dec 5, 2008 6:59:23 PM

In my opinion, the Westboro Baptist Church is the Antichrist, or rather Antichrist-like.

I have see no place in any of their media where Jesus Christ is mentioned. They can only use the term "God" because the evil they spew hasn't anything to do with the Christ.

Posted by: Sally Hunger | Dec 11, 2008 5:13:45 PM

Westboro's news page links to this, saying "Why you gotta use the photo from that dumb whore Tyra Banks' show?"?

Posted by: anon | Dec 13, 2008 3:00:31 PM

That's funny, anon. I actually love the write ups they do when linking here. They're very cheeky people!!